Nuclear Power’s Reboot

0:28This is a new era of American innovation.

0:40And of course, coordinated dance moves.

0:46But amongst all the fanfare, there was a hint about where our country's energy future is headed. Miss Wisconsin had something to say about it. As a nuclear engineer, I'm here to tell you the time to change is now. nuclear energy is a safe, effective, and zero-carbon method of producing power. Let's embrace clean energy for a cleaner future. I did not, first of all, think I was going to win Miss America. Second of all, think a nuclear engineer would become Miss America. Grace Vanderheil, a.k.a. Miss Wisconsin, ran on a platform of expanding nuclear power and was crowned Miss America at a pivotal time for energy politics.

1:27It was such an awesome time because, like, that was right before AI and all of these energy conversations really started taking place. And I sort of got to be on the forefront of energy conversations and energy education for Americans. Now, just a few years later, we're entering what the Trump administration is calling a nuclear renaissance. Last year, venture capitalists announced 45 new nuclear energy deals totaling$5.25 billion, according to PitchBook. That's over seven times as many deals as there were in 2018. Proponents of nuclear tout it as the carbon-free solution to our energy future and the key to winning the AI race.

2:09Companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft are all investing in nuclear plants to satisfy their growing electricity needs. But for decades, nuclear power was a no-go in the U.S. And we can make nuclear power obsolete because we have no choice. Because if we don't make it obsolete, it will make us obsolete. Opinions have shifted dramatically. The race to dominate a new energy-thirsty technology has tech leaders saying nuclear power is more necessary. The most important thing is to win the AI race. We have to have the most infrastructure. We need to have the most data centers. We need to have the most computing power, and that means more energy.

2:54We're even restarting a reactor on the site of the country's worst nuclear accident. It was the first step in a nuclear nightmare. How is this nuclear era going to be different? Will the U.S. achieve its unrealized energy goals this time around? It's Sunday, May 10th. I'm Katherine Sullivan for The Wall Street Journal. This is USA 250, a podcast series connecting America's economic present to its past. This is Episode 4, Nuclear Power's Reboot. On August 6, 1945, President Harry S. Truman made an announcement that would change the history of war and of science. A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.

3:44When we talk about the history of nuclear energy, it's impossible to disentangle it from nuclear weapons. In 1945, the U.S. became the first and only country to drop nuclear bombs in war. With this bomb, we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. These two bombs killed over 200 ,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It unleashed a level of annihilation never before seen. The secretive Manhattan Project had developed the bomb. It also fast-tracked our understanding of a new technology, nuclear fission, or the splitting apart of an atom's nucleus.

4:31In the United States, it's that Manhattan Project that really is the genesis of all of the rest of what has come since. Sarah Roby is an associate professor at Idaho State University, where she studies the history of nuclear science and technology. If nuclear technology was so powerful that it could destroy entire cities, could it also be harnessed to help power cities? And if so, could it change the way the world got its energy? In a facility in Idaho, scientists began testing different types of nuclear reactors. One of those reactors generated the first nuclear electricity. There are some very famous images of a little string of light bulbs lit by atomic power in 1951.

5:17This small production proved conclusively that nuclear reactions could generate electricity. The government needed to show people that this technology wasn't only useful in war. It could be used for peace and prosperity, too. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech at the United Nations titled Atoms for Peace. The United States would be more than willing. It would be proud to take up with others principally involved the development of plans whereby such peaceful use of atomic energy would be expedited. The U.S. not only encouraged friendly countries to build nuclear power plants, but also helped share knowledge, and in some cases, nuclear fuel with them.

5:59And the Eisenhower administration was also undertaking a rebranding campaign at home. You start seeing a lot of film reels and pamphlets and public education materials that sort of say, yes, atomic weapons have been used for this very powerful war purpose. But let me tell you about the glorious nuclear future that awaits us. It was even popularized in an educational film made by Disney. The atomic fire is an almost endless source of heat. We can use it in power stations for producing electricity. Electric power of our modern civilization. And so not only were they, you know, boosting or promoting nuclear power, but civilian nuclear transportation, so in trains and planes and cars even sometimes.

6:59And our last wish will come true. If we use the power of this knowledge in their spirit, then the atom will become truly our friend. In terms of the messaging that the public was receiving about the benefits of nuclear power, the phrase that was repeated over and over again is that it will be too cheap to meter. That was the selling point. That phrase, too cheap to meter, it helped to drive enthusiasm for the technology. It was first said by a government official named Louis Strauss. If you saw the movie Oppenheimer, you might be familiar with Strauss. He was played by Robert Downey Jr. Strauss was imagining a future where nuclear power was so abundant that it would be basically free.

7:44Too cheap to be tracked by your electric meter. And in 1957, the first commercial nuclear power plant roared to life in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. This was the first commercial power plant that was hooked up to the civilian grid. And it was inaugurated, you could say, with a lot of fanfare. So Eisenhower actually attended, you know, the opening ceremony, so to speak, for the Shippingport reactor. Nuclear power stations exclusively devoted to peaceful purposes. After that, an era of nuclear energy expansion unfolded. At the same time that fission reactors were popping up across the U.S., the government was working on a new kind of nuclear science.

8:29Nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is different from nuclear fission. Fusion requires heating atoms up to extremely high temperatures until they fuse together, releasing huge amounts of energy. It's the same process that powers the sun. When fusion takes place, a small amount of matter is converted into great energy. Can man imitate and control this fusing action of the sun and so create boundless power? Many consider it the holy grail of energy that would generate nearly limitless amounts of power. It added to the excitement for nuclear science, even though we still haven't made it work. Meanwhile, back in the 1960s, the government was making big predictions for fission.

9:17Officials were predicting that there would be 1 ,000 commercial power reactors in the United States by the year 2000. That never happened. But that's how optimistic they were, that starting new projects and getting more and more reactors on board, that's how optimistic they were feeling about the nuclear future in the 60s. At peak, there were about 112 reactors operating in the U.S. That's just over a tenth of the number officials hoped for. Today, there are 94. So what happened? There was a mentality that serious accidents could not happen in the nuclear power world. Viktor Galinsky is a nuclear physicist.

10:00He worked on nuclear policy under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He first started working in government in 1971. His job was to review licenses for new reactors. He said there was a lot of pressure to approve reactors quickly. You could not raise the possibility of a serious accident. You couldn't say, you know, you should not grant this license because there are not adequate provisions to prevent a serious accident. because a serious accident was deemed to be essentially not credible. A New York Times investigation in 1974 found that in just the previous year alone, the government found over 3 ,000 safety violations at nuclear power plants.

10:48But they only imposed penalties eight times. Critics like consumer advocate and future presidential candidate Ralph Nader said that the government put the commercial interests of the industry over safety. You have a situation where technological arrogance and corporate and governmental investment in the billions refuse to recognize that they have made a terrible mistake. When we come back, the accident that nobody thought could happen happens. For many years, there has been a vigorous debate in this country about the safety of the nation's 72 nuclear energy power plants. That debate is likely to be intensified because of what happened early this morning at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

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12:00On March 28, 1979, Victor Galinsky arrived at his office in Washington, D.C. He'd been appointed as a commissioner of a new independent government agency called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or the NRC. The NRC's job was to oversee the safety of the country's nuclear power reactors. I remember I came in the morning and one of the other commissioners rushed by me and said, can I use your car? And he was going off to the emergency center. I thought, why is he doing that? It was an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which is located on an island in the Susquehanna River, 10 miles from Harrisburg.

12:42And nobody seemed to know what exactly was going on. Operators at Three Mile Island had called in an emergency around 8 a.m. that morning. The plant was home to two reactors, operated by a company called Metropolitan Edison. And that day, something went wrong. Galinsky wasn't getting a lot of information from the workers on site. But one thing he did know, the radiation meters at one of the reactors was reading way too high. I mean, the feeling I had is things just did not sound right. And I felt it was a lot more dangerous situation than it was described. Officials from Metropolitan Edison Company, which operates the plant, attempted to minimize the seriousness of the accident, saying the public was never in danger.

13:26We may have some minor fuel damage, but we don't believe at this point that it's extensive. It's sort of interesting how emergency work. You imagine everybody's running around scurrying. In reality, everything slows down. The people living near the plant, in a town near Harrisburg called Middletown, were also confused about the information they were hearing. At first, they were told not to worry. It wasn't until two days after the accident, a Friday, that things became alarming. Former Middletown resident Paula Kinney was the mother of three young children at the time. She was at home when the governor made an announcement.

14:06My next-door neighbor, I was setting her hair in my kitchen dining room, and Governor Thornburg came on TV, and he said, as a precaution, we're going to evacuate people within the five-mile radius and those who have preschool children. I am advising those who may be particularly susceptible to the effects of any radiation, that is pregnant women and preschool-aged children, to leave the area within a five-mile radius of the three-mile... And that's when all hell broke loose. The situation here has become more and more confusing each day. Telephone lines in the Harrisburg area are jammed, and immediate highways are too as more people decide to leave.

15:00I think we're very close to a chaotic situation. Part of it, I think, is a lack of credibility of what we're being told. We were getting conflicting messages. If you live in a brick house, open your windows. if you live in a brick house, keep your window shut, your door shut. I mean, it was complete chaos. She remembers lines at gas stations and traffic leading out of Middletown as the community emptied out. When the children were brought home, I was so panicked inside, but I didn't want to reflect my panic to my children. So I just said, we're going to go to Nana and Pop-Ups in Wilkes-Barre. We're going to go visit them and have like a little mini vacation.

15:47Kenny and her family drove an hour and a half away to her in-law's house. They had us all take our clothes and put them in plastic bags and they were disposed of. I felt like a leper. And then to turn the TV on and to see Walter Cronkite show films of our neighborhood where we raised our children. But a nuclear safety group said that radiation inside the plant is at eight times the deadly level, so strong that after passing through a three-foot-thick concrete wall, it can be measured a mile away. The following week was a blur of news updates, expert opinions, and radiation tests. Here's what had really happened the day of the accident.

16:33At around 4 o 'clock in the morning, there was a problem with the cooling system at Unit 2. It caused temperatures to rise and triggered an automatic shutoff of the reactor. A valve at the top of the reactor got stuck open, letting radioactive steam escape into the containment building. Operators didn't realize the valve was open, and they cut off coolant to the reactor, which led to overheating. About half of the uranium fuel inside the reactor melted. After about 10 days, the public was told the threat of radiation had passed. Paula Kinney returned home with her husband and three children. No deaths or injuries were attributed to the partial meltdown.

17:13But the experience changed a lot for her. I lost so much trust in our government. I mean, it was like, I couldn't believe they did this to us. Kinney joined a growing movement protesting nuclear power. No more nukes! No more nukes! No more nukes! Historian Sarah Robey says the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island was a key moment for the anti-nuclear movement in the U.S. That was scary enough to enough people that public opinion dropped off precipitously about support for nuclear power. I think lots of people understood it as a very close call, but that maybe it's not worth pursuing this anymore.

18:03A movement that had been somewhat fragmented before 1979 began to coalesce. This was the Cold War, and the constant threat of nuclear weapons contributed to the fear of nuclear power. A series of no-nukes rallies took place across the country. It was the first major rally after the Harrisburg accident. And it was an accident. Like this one in San Francisco, where Ralph Nader addressed the crowd. There will be other rallies all over the country as more people who never had an opinion on atomic energy join those of you who have been working to stop this technological Vietnam right here in this country.

18:49In the decade after Three Mile Island, 67 nuclear plant projects were canceled. Public opinion shifted even further against nuclear power after the 1986 disaster at the Soviet nuclear plant Chernobyl in current-day Ukraine. By mid-1986, polls showed that over 70 % of Americans opposed new nuclear power plants in their communities. In addition to this long-term protest against nuclear, there was also kind of a simmering skepticism about the ability of nuclear agencies to do their job well and to be operating in the public interest and to be honest. The NRC did institute sweeping new safety regulations in the 1980s, many of them overseen by Viktor Galinsky.

19:38But still, for 25 years, no new plants were built in the U.S. And over a dozen were retired. In 2019, the remaining undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island was shut down. It was expensive to run, and the economics weren't working out. Activists celebrated. So how did we get from there to the so-called nuclear renaissance we see today? That's after the break.

20:17If there's one moment you can pinpoint when interest in nuclear power really started picking back up, it was this one, just a few weeks before Grace Vander Heye won the Miss America pageant in late 2022. A new online chatbot is making waves on social media for both its precise and also painfully honest answers. It's called ChatGPT, which stands for... ChatGPT and other AI services use huge amounts of energy. And all of a sudden, millions of Americans were using them regularly. And suddenly you have had data centers and tech companies saying they need, you know, gigawatts of power. Jennifer Hiller is an energy reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

21:01For the last five years, she's focused on nuclear power. A gigawatt is about what a reactor produces. So to have one facility that takes an entire reactor's worth of power is just something that we hadn't seen before. So it just really turned the power industry on its head. For context, a gigawatt is about the energy demand of San Francisco. Tech CEOs were talking about adding entire new cities' worth of energy needs to the grid. Dozens of them. Nuclear companies were listening. including Constellation, the company that owns the Three Mile Island site. In 2023, their CEO, Joe Dominguez, was at a meeting of corporate executives.

21:44He was listening to some leaders in tech. And they were talking about how much power they would need. And he was just stunned by the amount of electricity that the tech folks were talking about needing for AI and the size of data centers that they would build. And so he is sitting at this meeting and thinking they are going to need nuclear reactors to do this. And, you know, went home from this meeting and told people at Constellation to start looking at, you know, just what would it take to restart Three Mile Island. Constellation quickly found a partner in Microsoft to help restart the plant they had retired just five years before.

22:39Microsoft signed a 20-year deal with Constellation to buy the energy generated at the site for their AI data centers. Along with Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon have all signed deals for nuclear power. But these companies have a long road to getting nuclear electricity to their data centers. For one, it's expensive. Restarting Three Mile Island, now called the Crane Clean Energy Center, isn't as simple as flipping the lights back on. Constellation estimates it will cost about$1.6 billion to restart the one non-damaged reactor. That is also considered kind of low-hanging fruit for getting nuclear power onto the grid.

23:23This is kind of the easiest, fastest thing that you can do is just take a reactor that hasn't yet been dismantled and get it back online. Three Mile Island isn't the only plant being restarted. Google is helping fund a reopen of a plant in Iowa, and another plant in Michigan is scheduled to come back online this year. Yeah, this is a big deal. This is new in the U.S. Previously, if you closed a nuclear reactor down, you know, if you're decommissioning a nuclear power plant, that's just it. Kind of end of story. That plant goes away. If$1.6 billion for Three Mile Island sounds like a lot, in the world of nuclear, it's a bargain.

24:08A Bill Gates-backed company called TerraPower just got permitting to build an advanced type of reactor. The project is estimated to cost between$4 and$10 billion. Here's Gates on CBS in 2024. I feel great about the support we're getting from the federal government in this nuclear space to take our history of excellence and solve the problem that our current reactors are just way too expensive. TerraPower is among a swath of startups developing their own, smaller, next-generation nuclear reactors. The designs use different kinds of fuel, different kinds of cooling systems, and make bold promises.

24:49Some are even venturing into the world of nuclear fusion. I think we're going to get nuclear fusion to work in the next few years. Here's OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, in 2023. And importantly, not just as a scientific demonstration, but as incredibly cheap energy and at global scale. You might remember that people have been talking about nuclear fusion since the 1950s. The joke about nuclear fusion is that it's been about 10 or 20 years away for the past 80 years. But that hasn't dissuaded big tech. Sam Altman is invested in a fusion company, as is Bill Gates. Even the Trump family is invested in a fusion energy company.

25:33The Trump administration is trying to support all these nuclear endeavors. President Trump has set ambitious goals to build reactors as fast as possible. He aims to have several operating by this year's 4th of July. One of President Trump's core missions when he assumed the presidency was to unleash American energy dominance. Here's the energy secretary, Chris Wright, explaining the president's goals earlier this year. And in fact, he set out a very bold goal. This is just 12 months ago. He said by the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, meaning July 4 of this year, we're going to have multiple nuclear reactors critical.

26:18People thought that was crazy. To meet this goal, President Trump's administration is rolling back regulations to fast track these private sector nuclear projects. I asked Jennifer Hiller if she thought all of these companies would be successful. Oh, no, I don't think so. So there's definitely a huge hype cycle going on, but we do not yet know who's going to successfully deliver projects. So far, the public is going along with this hype. 61 % of Americans support nuclear power generation, according to a Gallup poll from last year. Just a decade ago, that number was only 44%. In the 1970s, a shift in public opinion helped bring the nuclear industry to a halt.

27:07This time around, the big question is, will AI give nuclear staying power? Or, like last time, will enthusiasm fizzle out? And that's it for this special edition of What's New Sunday for May 10th. USA 250 Nuclear Powers Reboot is produced by me, Catherine Sullivan, with supervising producer Jana Heron. Additional support from Chris Zinsley. Sound design and mixing by Michael LaValle. Fact-checking by Aparna Nathan. Special thanks to Anthony Bansy, Chris Marr, and Adam Stein. Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Aisha El-Muslim is our development producer, and Chris Zinsley is our deputy editor.

27:46I'm Catherine Sullivan, and we'll be back next month with the final installment of our USA 250 podcast. What's News will be back with a new episode tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.

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